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Question of the week:I love my antivirus, but sometimes I want it to be quiet, like when I’m using my laptop in the school library or in a cafe. How can I make avast! quiet? How about when I’m playing a game? Can I turn off popups?

We’re glad you’re happy with avast! and that you take us with you to school. There a few options for you. If you want to turn off notifications, go into the main user interface to Settings/Sounds and uncheck Enable avast! sounds. You can turn them all off, or choose specific events, like automatic update, that you want to silence.

An option designed for playing games or when you are giving a presentation and don’t want to be interrupted, is to activate the “Silent/gaming mode” so avast! will run automatically in silent mode when a full-screen application is running. This means your games or other full-screen applications will not be interrupted with annoying popups or other messages. The orange avast! icon located in your computer’s system tray can be used to access this feature without opening the main user interface. Right-click on the avast! icon and a short menu will appear. Click on Silent/gaming mode to turn it on.

For those, who remember my article about the “immortal” virus: here’s a proof. LookMyPC is a software for remote support and similar tasks. It has an official web page with downloads, which is unfortunately a place, where you can meet Win32:Parite virus.

In this blog post, I would like to introduce one variant of the widely spread malware family, often detected by avast! as “Reveton.” Reveton is classified as ransomware; a program which locks your computer and expects an action, usually the payment of money. Unless the desired amount of money is paid or the malicious application is removed, you cannot do anything with your computer.

In the screenshot below (figure 1), you can see an example of the fake United States Cyber Security notice. Cybercrooks cleverly try to convince the user that activities which violate the law have been detected on his computer. In the sample we analyzed, the user is being accused of illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted contents.

Figure 1

To mimic a realistic look, the United States Cyber Authority logo as well as basic information about the user’s location (IP, Location, IPS) are shown in the upper left corner. A black and white image resembling a web camera is shown in the upper right corner. This creates a feeling that the user is being watched by authorities right now via an integrated web camera. Most computers nowadays have integrated web cameras, however, at the computer where our analysis was performed, no web camera was present, but the video recording image was still shown.

Not only users visiting high-risk sites need avast! protection, but also, for example, visitors of the well-known site samsungimaging.net (the Samsung SMART CAMERA blog) were able to notice that their avast! protected them from a threat.

“…consumers think cleaning their bathroom, or in the extreme cases trying to solve world peace, sounds preferable to adding yet another password to the list.”

When scrubbing toilets and doing other household chores is preferable to thinking of new user names or passwords, then you know it’s a burdensome thing. A new national survey from Janrain, a social software services company, reveals that American adults need to remember five or more unique online passwords. Thirty-eight percent are so frustrated that they think tasks like folding laundry or scrubbing toilets – even solving world peace – might be easier than coming up with another new user name or password combination.

The majority of those surveyed say they try to create strong passwords, using letter and number combinations instead of obvious names or words, like “password,” but the problem is recalling the complicated passwords. Nearly 37 percent have to ask for assistance on their user name or password from at least one website per month.

“With all of the different websites consumers login to on a regular basis – from email and social networks to online banking and e-commerce sites – it’s no wonder people are struggling to remember such a large number of passwords,” Janrain CEO Larry Drebes said. “What’s surprising is that consumers think cleaning their bathroom, or in the extreme cases trying to solve world peace, sounds preferable to adding yet another password to the list.”

If you are experiencing password fatigue, and would like to never worry again about remembering your passwords, then try avast! EasyPass. You get strong, unique passwords for every site you visit – with just one click. The best part is that you access your passwords using one Master Password, so you don’t have to remember lots of passwords or waste time asking websites for help. Download a free trial of avast! EasyPass now.